That Coleridge with his mental pockets full of gold, and with a mine in fee wherefrom he not only replenished his daily purse but enriched his neighbors, should now and then borrow a guinea, is a fact at which we should rather smile than frown, or, more fitly, pass by without special sensation, seeing what has been the practice of the highest,--a practice which may with full ethical assent be regarded as a privilege inherent in their supremacy, the free use of all knowledge collected and experience acquired, no matter when, where, or by whom, being a natural right of him _who has the genius to turn it to best account_. That in certain cases where acknowledgment was due it was not made, we may ascribe to opinion; or to defects which broke the complete rotundity of such a circle of endowments that without this breach they would have swollen their possessor to almost preterhuman proportions, empowering him to "bestride the narrow world like a Colossus." Let the truth be spoken of all men. Let no man's greatness be a bar to full utterance; but let temperance and charity--duties peculiarly imperative when uttering derogatory truth--be especially observed towards a resplendent suffering brother like Coleridge, suffering from his own weakness, but on that very account entitled to a tenderer consideration from those who are themselves endowed to feel and claim something more than common human affinity with a nature so large and so susceptive. Could but a tithe of the fresh insights he has given us be allowed as an offset against his short-comings, never, from any scholar of sound sensibilities, would a whisper be heard against his name. Under the coarse, rusty, one-pronged spur of sectarian or political rancor, or from the knawing consciousness of sterile inferiority to a creative mind, plenty of people are ready and eager to try, with their net-work of flimsy phrases, to cramp the play of a giant's limbs, or, with the slow slimy poison of envy and malice, to spot and deform his beauty and his symmetry. To such, to the half-eyed and the half-souled, to the prosaic and the unsympathetic, be left all harsh condemnation of Coleridge. For the living, not for the dead, are these inadequate words spoken. The writings of Coleridge--in tone high, refined, noble; in expression rich, choice, copious; in spirit as pure as the sun's light; intellectually of rare breadth and mellowness and brilliancy--are a healthful power in literature, their influence solely for good, warming, strengthening, elevating. As for Coleridge himself, his is an immortal name; and as he walks through the ages his robes adjusting themselves with varying grace, in harmony with the mutations of opinion, his inward life will be ever fresh to his fellow-men, while his detractors will be shaken from him as _gryllidoe_ from the tunic of the superb Diana. * * * * * =_Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-_= (Manual pp. 478, 503, 531.) From "Essays," Second Series.